I watched the Blizzcon opening ceremony yesterday and the most interesting part was how little importance Blizzard is giving to World of Warcraft. The Warcraft movie and newer Blizzard games like Hearthstone or Overwatch took pride of place, and WoW was mentioned last with a non-announcement: Legion is coming out in Summer 2016, that is on or before September 21st, and you can pre-purchase it now. What a surprise!

As I still have a bunch of WoW tokens, I decided to pre-purchase Legion. I must say the pre-purchase bonuses aren't great: I'll get access to the demon hunter a bit earlier, in the pre-expansion patch, and I get my level 100 boost for one character now instead of when Legion comes out. That's it. Nothing really extra, only the same stuff earlier.

So I used one of my WoW tokens to get into the game and use the level 100 boost on my druid, which happened to be the only character left where I had any interest in leveling him to 100. I don't think I'll need a boost for the demon hunter, I guess he'll come out of his starting area at or near level 100. The nice surprise of the level 100 boost now is that it came with a level 3 garrison, so I don't have to build that up again.

The less nice surprise was that WoW tokens have gone up in price on both the North American and European servers. Where I used to pay under 50k for a token, I now have to pay over 60k. I guess I should stock 10 tokens before the expansion makes the price go up even further. And I think paying that token was a waste, as once in the game I couldn't be bothered to play much. My interest is currently being held by Shadow of Mordor, and WoW just is the same old as when I quit it two months ago.

I think Folman is right, the current demographics of players who are sticking around more favors the more dedicated players who already have plenty of gold (and would want to play for free). The expansion will add back in a lot of more casual players, who need fast gold (I should say, "need" gold, as it isn't as required as players seem to think).

No mention of WoW being at 5.5m subscribers, only losing 100k in the last quarter?

I'm expecting the price to go down as the expansion hits as well. You'll have a lot of players returning, who in general will have missed out on the garrison gold bonanza. They'll want gold for leveling, and the token will now be an option. So demand for gold should go up, so the price should go up. Since the $ cost is fixed ($20 in the US), that means the gold you get should go down to increase the $/g ratio. And since we're on the other end of that, we should be able to get a token for less gold.

It's called BlizzCon not WoWCon. I really look forward to Overwatch, that and Legion should be fun. Couldn't care less about the other games.

The panel about Legion was interesting, I like a lot of the stuff that's coming. Especially that all of the regions scale to your character so it doesn't matter where you level. I hope the former expansions get that system too, no more grey quests. Dungeons as core content is great too. And the new transmog system is direly needed on my 10 year old raid char.

Higher token prices later in the expansion seem natural because people who are inclined to pay cash for gold have a lot less content to pay for with that gold. Progression is pretty much over, raid/profession BoE aren't as interesting as before.

Blizzard did the right thing: people are slowly leaving from WoW and moving to something else. If they manage to covney those users to something that still belongs to Blizzard... they don't really lose players. This is why they're pushing on Overwatch, Heartsone, etc. They're new titles, new ways to capture new and old players.

WoW will never die in my opinion, but it will never shine again. It will get a huge rise of subscriptions in September '16 but it will be a temporary gain, for obvious reason. The game mechanics are old, the graphic engine is extremely old, there is no way to really resuscitate it and bring back the glorious old numbers.

Now I still don't understand you Tobold. Why did you spend that money for a prepurchase when you was at least 99% sure you wouldn't enjoy it? What did you expect...?

I did enjoy leveling in Warlords of Draenor, and I believe I will enjoy it again in Legion. The problem with WoW is that it takes nearly 2 years between expansions and there is not enough content to fill those 2 years in one expansion.

On the topic of game time token: half a year ago almost in sync with token introduction was a huge bot ban wave. All those players can reactivate their account in a couple days. Let's see if if the price curve changes!